March 27, 2013 AT 10:50 am

Use MAME’s debugger to reverse engineer and extend old games

For the Church of Robotron’s installation at Toorcamp 2012, we needed to be able to trigger physical events when game events happened in Robotron 2084. A quick summary for context:

We had an Altar that contained a Linux box that ran MAME and Robotron 2084

We had joysticks that acted as HID devices

Player would kneal down and play the game. As events happened in the game (player death, human death, lasers firing), we would trigger physical events.

We choose to use MAME’s debugger to detect game events and notify other pieces of software when they happened. This is a quick tutorial for others (and a reminder to ourselves) if you’re interested in doing similar things. We’re going to find out how to detect player death!